This is the sort of topic where I am (we are..) in danger of taking
myself too seriously. For an 8 year old child who hasn’t lived in a war zone,
the future stretches out forever. For a 70 year old (as I’m about to become)
the past and what’s left of a future life look impossibly brief. Hell, the
fun has hardly begun, and too much of that snippet of time called a past life
was spent being polite to somebody else’s rules. On the other hand, if there
had been no rules to keep the wolves at bay, my bones by now might have been
bleaching in a shallow grave.

It seems we need some rules to live by, but not of a kind or
interpretation that will shut us off from all fun, mischief or even danger
sometimes, lest we become mere weakling prisoners on a treadmill of time. In
other words, rules for the ordering of human lives and societies cannot be
simple choices of black and white. Such rules must leave space for movement,
for “degrees of freedom”. It turns out that “degrees of freedom” are critical
in nature, in science and in technology too, so in that sense human
organization is not so special.

2. Degrees of freedom

A heartbeat comes from a series of processes with a particular outcome. Thinking of this outcome, we could say that no two heartbeats are ever quite the same. If they were, it is likely that our heart
muscles would be destroyed in infancy by the targeted, repetitive force.
However, if those heartbeats vary beyond a small tolerance, the heart goes into
fibrillation, all cardiac control is lost and the person dies. Within that
small tolerance of movement, those “degrees of freedom”, variation is random
and unpredictable. This limited random variation, however brief, gives the
organism space to relax, recover and grow. The phenomenon just described has
now been studied in many fields under the general name of Chaos Theory, and
more latterly Complexity Theory. It also has a great deal to do with what
happens in human societies.

The public conception of technical devices, like the internal
combustion engine, is that they are precise and utterly predictable in
operation (hence boring). However, every engineer understands that anything
which moves must be allowed a certain “tolerance”. Even things which are not
supposed to move, like buildings and bridges and railway tracks have
carefully calculated tolerances for movement and expansion to prevent them
self-destructing. Like a beating heart, the piston moving in an engine’s
cylinder never quite follows the same path twice. It can vary randomly within
a few thousandths of an inch, for without that freedom it could not move at
all.

Now let’s think of that mass of contradictions, the normal human being.
Normal? Your average working stiff will conversationally claim that he/she
has a great deficit in “degrees of freedom”. Certainly the tighter the
routine, the greater often is the level of stress, yet left to their own
devices these same working stiffs will rarely show great enterprise or
originality. A few hours in front of an anaesthetizing TV is more common.
There is therefore a restricted band of freedom within which people function
effectively at all, a routine that allows limited variation, not too much and
not too little. The factories and companies that employ them, and the
governments which govern them also function within restricted bands of
routine, or degrees of freedom, sometimes defined by convention, sometimes by
law. It is at the margins of these bands that ambiguity and conflict occur
constantly at a low level, or sometimes spin out of control when good
judgement and tolerance is lost.

Some people seem to have vastly greater “degrees of freedom” than
others. A popular idea is that wealth is a pass to freedom of this kind, and
hence a supposedly universal goal. One catch here is that lifetimes are
finite. Many individuals of a certain age, conforming to a set of
career rules and narrow routines, are suddenly retired into apparent freedom.
Most do not know what to do with such new freedom. I see legions of my age
peers dissipate physically and mentally, and die, for want of a purpose
beyond the mating game, or the self discipline to pursue some light on a
distant hill (however illusory that might be). They had forgotten that the
journey was more important than the destination. Others, less patient,
more reckless, perhaps more ruthless at a younger age, evade confining rules
and expectations. They may be entrepreneurs or criminals, or radical
thinkers, or researchers who break away from accepted models. Sometimes they
are just adventurers in games of love or power. They may fail
catastrophically or they may succeed beyond all expectation. They embody the
idea of “Who Dares Wins [ahem, or loses..]”.

Some humans are heavily confined. That is, they are imprisoned in one
way or another. A prisoner may have violated the norms or rules of his/her
society beyond socially accepted degrees of tolerance, and therefore have
their degrees of freedom restricted to prevent them damaging others. Of
course in human societies, which are extremely complex, “accepted degrees of
tolerance” for deviation from a norm are often neither clear nor consistent.

Winding up in jail can sometimes come from sheer bad luck, or being a victim
of malevolent entrapment, or even having the wrong skin colour. More
commonly, imprisonment can come from belonging to a competing sub-culture
(with different norms), or lacking the intelligence, experience or judgement
to navigate complex choices, or simply lacking the functional literacy to
avoid the many traps of an increasingly complex lifestyle. Then there are
smart banksters, with degrees in mathematics and no conscience, who can play
roulette with the savings of millions of people, ignore all prudential rules,
lose the lot – other people’s money, not their own. A penalty for them? No of
course not.

3. Can there be the same rules and laws for everyone?

In many societies laws and rules simply do not apply equally to
everyone. This is expected, and may be accepted. There have always been stories,
collections of oral lore, and since the invention of writing, texts, to
justify a social ordering of individuals in ways which severely disadvantage
some people relative to others. Historically, women in most communities have
had limited rights in public domains, but sometimes special privileges in
certain private domains. Traditionally in warfare it has been the men who are
slaughtered, while the women and children are carried off into slavery. The
Christian Bible, the Koran, the Indian caste system, the Confucian writings
of China, all assume hierarchical societies where the moral order prescribes
an unequal assignment of rights to according to gender, birth status,
occupation or wealth.

In clear conflict with traditional moral values of inequality, most
modern societies claim that all men (meaning women too) are born equal and
should stand equal before the laws of the land. It is common for the
constitutions of states to proclaim exactly this. Yet all of us know that
even in the most liberal and democratic societies some people are “more
equal” than others. These inequalities are found at every level from petty
privilege to the most deadly legal entanglements where life and death is at
stake. Most of us have some pragmatic tolerance for inequalities of this
kind. It’s not a perfect world. We may bend the rules a bit ourselves from
time to time to make life tolerable. It is a matter of degree and judgement.
Others, disadvantaged in some way from birth, might conclude that the system
will be forever stacked against them. They form sub-cultures, pass us on the
street, but live by different codes. When it is a case of “them” and “us”,
violating the laws and rules of “the other” may carry no stigma.

The sense of “them” and “us” has a great effect on the political
dynamics of any country, both internally and externally. For example, a
contemporary issue in Australia (even more so in the United States) is that
“government of the people, by the people, for the people” seems to be
becoming a threadbare and dishonest slogan. Increasingly large numbers of the
governed perceive that major commercial companies, especially multinationals,
use governments as proxies to promote commercial profit for the company, and
damn the electorate. The structure and application of taxation law is a
glaring example. While the Australian Taxation Department will pursue the
extraction of income and small business taxes relentlessly, huge
multinational corporations shift billions of dollars into overseas tax havens
with impunity. This is a recipe for political revolt.

So can there be rules and laws for everyone? In a country like
Australia, most rules and laws claim to be for everyone. In spite of
imperfections, there is a reasonable civil society in Australia, and a
usually a workable level of public trust. This leaves enough space in daily
life to at least pretend the same rules apply to everyone. We know very well that the young, for example, are apt to do some dumb things before they gain responsibility and life experience, so we try to cut them a bit of slack, or give a warning, where an older rule breaker would attract a less forgiving response.

When real injustices,
meaning inequalities, occur there is usually some formal mechanism for
claiming correction. However, anyone who has spent time in a court of law
knows that the whole process of navigating a fair society is very approximate
indeed. If you have the misfortune to get your hair tangled in the legal
machine, your personal outcome can depend upon luck, money and what
particular prejudice a judge lives by. You have “black letter judges” with literal minds who
decode printed statutes by the strict formal meaning (they believe) of words and grammar, and others who are far more open to interpreting the
actual intent of the law and the circumstances of the defendant.

4. Who are the obedient fools, and who are the wise men licensed to exercise
judgment?

Well, the fools of course are not me, and should I charitably say, not
you. They are “the others”. If I’m an unemployed 17 year old high school drop
out from a depressed neighbourhood, you bastards driving BMWs are “the
others”. If I’m a comfortably employed and housed middle aged businessman
with a private school background, I’m surely licensed to take a few liberties
that would be unthinkable for the dole bludgers on the other side of town ….
And so it goes. Whoever we are, we get away with whatever we can get away
with, according to temperament. We wax indignant when the less deserving get
away with their own fiddles. When things go bad, when our luck goes down the
drain, and perhaps the long arm of the law fingers us, we rationalize furiously.
Life is just not fair, we complain.

5. Are some societies more rule-compliant than others?

It does seem that some societies or cultures are more amenable to
following formal rules and laws than others. Individual societies also change
over historical time.

Singapore when I first saw it in 1971 was a rather slip-shod town in
the tropics, not the uptight concrete jungle we see now, where you are fined
for having chewing gum. Germany and Japan are both relatively rule-governed
societies, which doubtless has something to do with their present commercial
success and record of civil safety, but also had them marching lock-step into
brutal wars in the mid-20th Century. Neither South Korea nor China
are rule-governed societies in this sense. I worked in both countries for a
number of years. In both China and South Korea cheating is endemic at every
level in their present historical phase. One Korean dentist, a man with a PhD
from South Korea’s best university, confided to me as a friend that “we see
cheating as a kind of freedom”.

The reasons for cultural differences in rule compliance, like most things human, are complicated. However a key to these broad pattern variations (and also pattern variations between individual families) is probably traceable to methods of child raising. By pre-puberty most children have a clear idea of what is "right" and "wrong", what is doable and what is unacceptable in the community around them. They hear of course what their parents say, but above all they internalize habits from what their parents and their peers actually do.

In one community or family, rules might be externally imposed, even by physical coercion, whereas in other families children are induced to internalize self-discipline by carefully coaxing their feelings and desires in a particular direction. Where rules are externally imposed, it seems to be fairly common for transgressors to feel little guilt about ignoring them when nobody is looking (hence my Korean friend's description of cheating as a kind of freedom).

Setting out to change any of this as part of some political agenda in social engineering is like doing brain surgery with a blunt axe. Mao Zedong tried something along those lines in China. The unintended consequences are still reverberating, and emphatically not what he had in mind. We could say the same about "educational reforms" in any number of countries.

6. Are rule enforcers more significant than rule breakers?

In our daily lives we make all kinds of rules for ourselves. For these rules were are also mostly the enforcers. Nobody else cares if a New Year resolution to stop smoking or eat no more than three cream cakes a day falls by the wayside. It is rule which turns out to be ineffectual. On the other hand, as a five year old we might promise ourselves never to put our fingers on a stove hot plate again, and this is likely to be an enduring bit of self control.

When it comes to rules invented by other people, matters are more complex since it usually someone else who does the enforcing. If they don't enforce the rule, then as with our own self-indulgences, it might be safe to ignore it as yet another piece of publicity spin, or a dead letter. British common law for example is cluttered with all kinds of legal detritus from centuries past which no sane authority would dream of invoking today. Social change can bring about this kind of situation too. For example, Australia's so called White Australia Act, restricting immigration by a racial criterion, was a dead letter well before it was officially repealed.

Real difficulty, or a least the need for wise judgement, is a daily dilemma for people officially tasked with enforcing apparently clear regulations and laws. This is the normal lot of police officers and school teachers for example. As a teacher of teenagers or younger children I might find it necessary to lay down certain class rules to ensure the smooth operation of teaching and learning for a restless group of immature minds. Some teachers try to enforce this kind of proscription rigidly and find that they have a class in open rebellion, or showing passive resistance. In either case, learning goes out the window. Other teachers retreat from behavioural rule enforcement completely and find themselves in a chaotic situation where learning also fails. A skilled teacher exercises leadership by example, and shows subtle discretion in enforcement, according to the psychology of each transgressor. It is a hard set of choices, needing lots of professional wisdom.

What goes for school rooms also goes for countries, as the preceding section notes in discussing dominantly rule-based societies Vs relatively non-rule based societies. All countries now have library shelves groaning with volumes of rules and regulations. Their significance rests not in the forms of words enacted, but in their practical application.

For example, the enormous nation of China has a fifth of all the world's people, with 34 top level administrative divisions, including 23 provinces, many larger than "normal" countries. There are hundreds of cities. There is a history of bureaucratic rule application dating from at least the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE). You would think that the Chinese should have the efficient management of rules sorted by now. On the contrary, the first law of the land, the constitution, is randomly contradicted by provincial laws which in turn are randomly violated by local regulations. The actual application of this massive entanglement turns with great inconsistency upon the habits and prejudices of individual judges, and the supra-legal intervention of prosecutors who take their orders from a political party, the Communist Party of China. Not surprisingly individual Chinese citizens tend to be sceptical about the rule of law at all, and form quite different attitudes to violating this or that part of it compared to what you might expect from, say, an Australian citizen accustomed to the broad idea that laws are there for the benefit of everyone and applied fairly.

7. Can we be over-governed?

There is a phrase being heard with increasing frequency in Australia, “the Nanny State”. The implication is that Australians are being coddles like
young children, protected from all possible risks, and thus being denied the
chance to accumulate the street cunning, wisdom and resilience to survive in
a big bad world. Like the “obedience of fools” meme, assessing the Nanny
State condition is a tough call. Some of the protection is petty to the point
of being insulting, while some tough regulation has come out of direct
community experience at the hands of scoundrels.

As a primary school student in the 1950s I lived in the mountains on
the margin of bushland. Each day I walked alone, or with my younger sister,
about four miles to school. Out of school I always carried a pocket knife,
which was endlessly useful, and often a rather lethal sheath knife in my
belt. I swung a sharp axe with professional aplomb after school to cut
firewood from tough old gum trees. Alone in the bush I was careful to tread
heavily to warn off snakes, but when I remembered also carried a razor blade
to cut and bleed any snake bite, together with a shoe lace to improvise as a
tourniquet. Your modern mother, ferrying her little darlings to the school
gate in an air conditioned sedan would faint in horror at such risks. Instead
I learned young to manage such risks. Much later, working in China, for one
yuan I bought a small folding razor blade for opening packets. Recently,
trying for the same in Australia I learned that some idiot regulating do-good
department had removed all such items from store shelves. Ditto even for
metal tooth picks. The Nanny State out of control.

At the other end of the spectrum, Australian society, like every other,
has always been home for significant numbers of confidence tricksters, rent
seekers, carpet-bagging politicians, and businessmen ready to ignore any kind
of ethical or environmental constraint. As buccaneering youths, these
characters often favour the libertarian posture, but become wily with age and
seek secret financial advantage. Together this motley crew wrestle to control
and redirect the ship of state whenever an opportunity presents itself.
Opposed to them are those seeking regulation in various ways, usually with
good intentions, but shading into the suffocating Nanny State tendency.

Citizens, you and I, we live with the ever multiplying, ever more
obscure barrage of laws and regulations which emerge from the political
contest. The simple things, like not killing the bus driver, we try to get
right most of the time. Beyond the clarity what Christian types call the Ten
Commandments, for better or for worse we exercise our judgement as wise men
and women, and hope for the best.

Jordan, D.K. (~2004) “Chinese
Philosophical Terms”. [ Quite a good introduction to a non-European value set
for dividing up the world. As with Christian values etc, the ideal is often
directly contradicted by common social behaviour]. Class materials from
University of California, San Diego. Online at http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbphiloterms-u.html

Professional bio: Thor May has a core professional interest in cognitive linguistics, at which he has rarely succeeded in making a living. He has also, perhaps fatally in a career sense, cultivated an interest in how things work – people, brains, systems, countries, machines, whatever… In the world of daily employment he has mostly taught English as a foreign language, a stimulating activity though rarely regarded as a profession by the world at large. His PhD dissertation, Language Tangle, dealt with language teaching productivity. Thor has been teaching English to non-native speakers, training teachers and lecturing linguistics, since 1976. This work has taken him to seven countries in Oceania and East Asia, mostly with tertiary students, but with a couple of detours to teach secondary students and young children. He has trained teachers in Australia, Fiji and South Korea. In an earlier life, prior to becoming a teacher, he had a decade of finding his way out of working class origins, through unskilled jobs in Australia, New Zealand and finally England (after backpacking across Asia to England in 1972).